The War of the Chosen expansion for XCOM 2 introduces three factions that hate each other, and it’s up to the player to unite them to defeat the aliens. This social tension is represented in gameplay through the “Lost and Abandoned” mission, which introduces the player not only to the factions themselves, but also to the new threats that make the factions necessary. Although the factions are strong, they also have weaknesses, and the player learns firsthand why they need to work together.

In many ways, Dishonored 2’s narrative setup is exactly the same way it was in the original Dishonored. There are only so many ways that someone can be dishonored. But after the titular inciting incident, the two games diverge in how they handle temporal morality: the way that characters (including the player) develop their sense of morals as the game progresses. The first Dishonored focuses on moving forwards into the future, whereas Dishonored 2 focuses on unraveling events that happened in the past. These two directions cause their stories to be different in subtle but important ways.

The nature of procedural level generation makes it hard for designers to implement a smooth difficulty curve. Instead, each level is treated as a static plateau of difficulty, with large jumps from level to level. With old-fashioned hand-placed levels, designers can create scenarios that have a much smoother flow of difficulty, even within the same level. But Dead Cells manages to get the best of both worlds: randomly generated levels with self-contained difficulty curves.

Rakan and Xayah have brought a new level of synergy to the League: their abilities explicitly reference each other by name for an additional effect. This has never happened to the same degree, and it raises a lot of questions about balance. But before those, we have to address some definitions: what exactly is synergy? How can we categorize it? What makes Rakan/Xayah’s synergy different from any other pair, and how can this distinction help us understand League’s design?

Many triple-A JRPGs rely heavily on suspension of disbelief to carry their narratives. Titles like Nier: Automata overload the player with so much immediate emotion that they’re not given any time to think about the massive inconsistencies. These plot holes are explained if the player spends a long time searching for collectibles like notebooks or diaries that explain what is happening, but this process tells a story through text rather than showing it through play. What if this didn’t have to be the case?